Home For An Art Lover

Celebrated 1901 Design Finally Has Its Chance At Life

November 09, 1996|By Warren Hoge, New York Times News Service.

GLASGOW — The year was 1901, and in the world of design it was a moment full of possibilities. Glasgow was the booming second city of the British Empire, its progressive architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh was experimenting with daring new concepts, and a German art magazine staged an international competition for a "grand house in a thoroughly modern style."

Mackintosh submitted an entry that was hailed by one prominent critic of the day for its "absolutely original character, unlike anything else known."

The proposal didn't win: Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald, his wife and artistic collaborator, were disqualified when they failed to submit the required number of interior perspectives in time. But the judges found the proposal so appealing that they created a special prize for it.

Now, 95 years later, Mackintosh's House for an Art Lover, admired on paper for decades, has sprung to robust life in a hillside park here. The construction of the four-story building with four fully furnished rooms shows that even many architectural eras later, Mackintosh's visionary mixture of starkness and warmth has retained its power to astonish.

Mackintosh's entry for the competition represented his most advanced thinking, unfettered by commercial specifications or financial restraints. "It was the only time he didn't have a client looking over his shoulder," said Andrew MacMillan, a former head of the Mackintosh School of Architecture at the Glasgow School of Art. "This was a chance for him to express in the most fundamental manner what he felt about art, architecture and landscape."

At the turn of the century, the Continental avant-garde looked with almost rapturous anticipation to the Glasgow architect who so successfully merged a northern building tradition -- in his case Scottish baronial -- with the delicate organic forms of Art Nouveau. A year earlier, at the Secession exposition in Vienna, he had been borne triumphantly through the city's streets in an open carriage by admirers of his innovative vision.

The designs for the House for an Art Lover, widely reproduced at the time in colored lithographs, proved influential on the Continent and embodied ideas that were to flourish in Germany and Austria over the next 20 years, while Mackintosh himself was to decline, neglected, into alcoholism, exile in the south of France and finally poverty and death in London in 1928.

The house has figured prominently in Mackintosh exhibitions and in the many books that have been written about him since his reputation began its recovery 30 years ago. But until now, the house had only the ghostly presence of ink on paper.

What has risen in Bellahouston Park, and what opened to the public on Oct. 26, is as faithful to Mackintosh's conception as the incomplete drawings permit. At the entrance to each room is an easel displaying the original design for the space. Lift your eyes and the real room beckons.

From the outside, the building commands the hillside the way an ocean liner rides high in the water in port. This effect could not have been accidental, since turn-of-the-century Glasgow was the world's leading builder of luxury oceangoing ships and the busy Clydeside docks were visible from the parts of the city that Mackintosh frequented.

The exterior is of a heavily textured rough gray material called harling here. The four furnished rooms on the second floor -- the Main Hall, Dining Room, Music Room and Oval Room -- are a showcase of the richness of the Mackintosh style. They display how broadly it ranged, from the somber stateliness of the dark-stained floors and paneling to the stagy angularity of his signature high-backed chairs and the filagreed delicacy of the fireplace grilles and gesso panels inlaid with gems in pinks and purples.

One moment you are in the funereal darkness of the hall; the next you are standing in a room as startlingly white as summer lightning.

Married in 1900, the year before the house was designed, Mackintosh and Macdonald worked with intimacy in their art, with her celebrated sense of color informing his mastery of space, structure, texture and lighting. She was also known for an elaborate and delicate technique with gesso that is seen in the panels ringing the top of the Dining Room walls like embroidery.